Thursday, June 4, 2009

One of my favorite running features on MarginalRevolution.com, an economics and culture blog run by George Mason University professors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, is "Markets in Everything" where they discuss the presence of markets for random and typically pretty insane things. I'm stealing the concept for one quick post:

As Will posted earlier, today is the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre that took place on June 4th, 1989. However, in China, all references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and today's date June 4th, have been censored throughout the country. Any reference to this date on the internet in China is being blocked (I'm sure this blog is already blocked in China now that we have posted twice about the massacre).

Chinese bloggers and internet users, however, have created a cleverlittleway to evade this censorship by using May 35th, instead of June 4th, as a reference to the massacre when seeking to write about this major incident. Just goes to show the ingenuity of these bloggers and the rise of a market for a 35th day in the month of May.